breaking points
by signelchan
Summary: Sometimes bad things just happen, to anyone at any given time, and that's just how life goes. [Bad Things Happen Bingo compilation fic. Prompt Eleven: Bleeding Through the Bandages, Tenko. Prompt Twelve: Slammed Into a Wall, Toko.]
1. Crutches - Kaito and Maki

If do-overs were allowed in life, Maki would have requested one for the past day she'd had to live without hesitation. She'd suffered through a lot doing assassin work, from surprise attacks to thinking she was going to die with a blade brushing against the skin of her neck, but nothing compared to what she'd gone through during what should have been an innocent night at the theater. It had been Kaito's idea to go on the date in the first place, him beyond excited to watch the latest space movie that had just hit screens, and as much as she didn't care for the dark, loud setting of the movie theater she didn't want to deny him something so innocent and harmless.

Had she known that they wouldn't be going home that night after the movie, or even watching the whole film, she would have put her foot down and denied his date night idea. But she wasn't gifted with being able to see the future, and hindsight was always twenty-twenty; there was no taking back what she'd managed to cause there in the theater, no matter how much she wished she could. She sighed, leaning back in her seat and running her hand over her forehead, which thankfully seemed to be relatively normal, despite the hard fall she'd taken when the panic of someone being in the theater with them had invaded her mind. It wasn't rational what she'd done, jumping up to her feet in a hurry and trying to climb over Kaito to get out of the area as fast as she could, but his reaction to her sudden movement hadn't been necessary either.

All she knew was that when he pulled her down, she retaliated by flipping herself over him, and despite her small stature she was able to throw him out of his seat with ease. When she hit the floor she'd managed to slightly bump her forehead and bruise one of her arms, and that was her getting out of the situation easy. Kaito, by virtue of being thrown by a trained assassin, hit the wall of the theater hard and fell to the floor on his head, which would have been bad enough except he landed precariously at the top of the stairs leading down to the ground level, and before anyone could react to what had transpired he began falling down those, only stopping when his legs ended up properly underneath him. But by then the damage had been done, and he was left sitting there, dazed and entirely unaware of what had just happened to him, until the theater lights came on and he and Maki were both escorted outside, banned from entering once again for life.

By the time they were standing outside of the glass doors leading back in, it was clear that something wasn't right with Kaito, based on how he was severely hobbling and grimacing with every step as he walked, but Maki was too ashamed of what she'd done to ask him anything about it. Instead, she simply accepted that she needed to take responsibility and get him looked at, afraid she'd concussed him in her panic and that he was going to pass out and die if she kept him without care. While that was, in fact, something she'd done to him, what was equally concerning was that he'd managed to fracture both lower leg bones in one leg, and slightly sprained the ankle on the other, and he couldn't recall how any of it had happened to himself.

Maki was mortified when she heard the specific diagnosis of her boyfriend's ailments, but she couldn't admit to him or anyone that she'd been the one responsible for them, because she knew that doing so would result in her being arrested or in some form of legal trouble. She'd refused to be checked out by the medical experts that night, but by morning when she'd found herself with an aching head despite no visible lumps she had her own problems looked at just to be told that she seemed fine, that she just needed to rest and everything would be okay.

Sleep was hard to come by with the way her head was throbbing, but she eventually found herself drifting into it, thoughts of how she would have changed what happened being the last and first things she remembered to bookend her sleep. Since she wasn't injured enough to warrant her own stay in a hospital bed, that sleep was attained in an uncomfortable chair in the room with Kaito, him completely unaware of what was going on around him long before she'd found herself able to drift off. He was back to reality before her as well, patiently waiting for her to wake up before he was attempting to kick his legs at her, one wrapped tightly in bandages and one merely splinted. "Hey there, Maki Roll!" he called when he saw her beginning to stir, her eyes shooting open immediately at the sound of his chipper voice. "When'd we get here? I don't remember leaving the theater last night, did something happen while we were watching the movie?"

"We can call it that," she replied, stifling a yawn with the back of her hand. All she could think about was the fact that she'd done that to him, she'd caused him to sustain these injuries, and for what reason? Because she'd thought someone had been there to harm them while they were on their movie date, and him trying to calm her had done the exact opposite? "We'll have to go back sometime and finish watching it, if you want."

"Nah, I'm good with just catching it on TV or something, it wasn't that good…well, what I remember of it, anyway!" He laughed, a happy sound in such a desolate place, and it was enough to bring a smile to Maki's face, albeit a tiny one. "Bet you're not gonna tell me what happened to me, huh?"

Just as quickly as he'd made her smile, he'd caused her to go right back to frowning, unamused at his immediate jump to try and find things out. "I'd love to, if I remembered what happened myself," she lied, biting her tongue to keep herself from adding anything unnecessary to the statement. "I'm better off than you are, clearly, but it's not like I know what happened to us either."

"Guess that's fair, can't expect you to answer all my questions all the time." Shrugging off her rejection, Kaito once again tried to kick his feet, but his face contorted into a pained expression due to one (or both) of his legs. "Geez, whatever happened to me could've done better to miss the legs, I need those to get around. You're gonna have to start working out a bunch, Maki Roll, 'cause I'm gonna need you to carry me around everywhere!"

"I think I can handle that anyway," she told him, thinking about how she'd had to more or less carry him into the hospital after the intensity of his injuries had gotten to him the night before. That wasn't something she'd admit to remembering, nor was it something she was going to ask him about, so she pushed the memory away and tried to move on. "How long have you been awake? Has someone come in to see you?"

"Never slept," he replied, a prideful tone to his voice. "Wasn't allowed to, 'cause of my head getting hit or whatever, I don't know. They kept coming in and drugging me up and telling me I couldn't fall asleep, so I just kinda…stared at you all night." If looks could kill, the glare that Maki shot at him for the way he said that would have made Kaito slump over in that bed, but she wasn't going to be able to do more damage to him with just her eyes. "Don't worry, I wasn't thinkin' anything weird. Actually, I don't think I was really thinkin' anything at all, I don't even know how I remember what I was doing."

"Well let's hope that you don't have to do it again." Her glare faltering as she heard the door to the room open up, Maki let herself go silent while the nurse entered to tend to her patient's needs, which were not as bad as they could have been, given the extent of his injuries. Sure, he had a leg with two broken bones in it, but they weren't completely snapped, just slightly fractured, and the medical team seemed to believe that those would heal faster and stronger than his other ankle did, but because both legs were injured he'd be stuck unable to walk for a few days. That was acceptable, though, due to his slight head injury that required him resting more than anything else, and to combat the immense guilt she felt for what had happened Maki was not going to let him do anything but follow the strict doctor orders he was given.

When he was discharged the following day, being kept another night just to make sure his concussion wasn't worse than it seemed, those strict orders were almost immediately disregarded as he reached for the crutches they gave him to use _after_ the first week, trying to walk himself out of the place. Maki nearly had to tackle him to get him to stop, as her telling him several times didn't do a thing—if there was one thing Kaito was, it was incredibly insistent that he knew what he was doing that was best for himself. He complained the whole time about having to be wheeled out of the hospital, he complained that Maki was having to drive him home, he complained twice as loud when she was carrying him up to the small apartment he lived in, and once he was there and had the crutches within reach again he was trying to grab them to get himself around the apartment.

As much as she wanted to let her boyfriend learn the lesson of overworking himself, Maki couldn't allow for him to further injure either of his legs. "If that's how you're going to be, I'm going to stay here and keep an eye on you," she threatened, but the threat was lost on Kaito. After all, he saw his girlfriend offering to stay with him as a bit of a victory, and now that he knew it was on the table he was going to do whatever he could to get her to follow through with the threat.

What transpired over the coming week was exactly what was to be expected: Kaito constantly tried to show that he was stronger than it seemed, and Maki had to keep putting him in his place however she could. The crutches were the biggest point of contention, a temptation that he was failing to resist and that she was refusing to hide out of sight simply because she didn't want to find him stumbling around in a splint and a cast looking for where she'd hidden them. His apartment may have been small but it certainly was large enough for him to cause more damage to himself if given the chance.

After a week the fun and games ended, as he was allowed to begin walking on the sprained ankle as needed, but he couldn't put any weight on the broken leg until he had it looked at again. That didn't mean that Kaito suddenly didn't want Maki around anymore, as he'd found himself a bit spoiled on his girlfriend's company and even though he could move as he wished with his crutches he didn't want her to make him fend for himself. On the other hand, Maki was beyond tired of babysitting him and was ready to go back to her own place and her own life for a little while. The moment she tried to leave for the first time, he chased her down as fast as he could on those crutches and attempted to swat her with one to get her to reconsider, but all that accomplished was him losing his balance and falling into the wall, catching himself last-second and swearing up and down he was okay.

She'd done this to him, she reminded herself, and if he didn't want her leaving then she supposed that she could stick around to keep him in line. All it was doing was adding time to the list of time she'd request a do-over on.

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**A/N: I've been kind of waiting to see if I got more requests for Bad Things Happen Bingo before I started posting the things I'd written, but honestly I don't think more will come in until people see how serious I am about doing this! you can find the full bingo card on my tumblr (which is on my profile)!**


	2. Grabbed by the Chin - Kaito and Maki

Things were beyond irreparable in Maki's mind, and there was not much that she thought could be done to attempt fixing what had happened. She hadn't meant to snap at Kaito, she hadn't meant to berate him with her angered words until his normally unsinkable spirits had taken a complete nosedive and he'd stormed out on her. It was the first time she'd seen him genuinely furious with her, and over what, a minor argument that she'd let get far out of hand because she refused to stop standing her ground? Now she didn't know what was going to happen between them, and if she'd lost her boyfriend over something as stupid as arguing about who paid for a date she'd planned, she didn't know how she'd forgive herself for it.

The tiny apartment she lived in felt oppressively small as she sat around, waiting for him to either come back or call her asking her to talk about what had happened. She knew that expecting him to make the first move in making amends was risky, but she also knew that if she tried saying anything to him while he was upset with her she may only make matters worse. Dealing with romantic disputes wasn't something that either of them were trained in, and this was uncharted territory for them both, but she had enough faith that he'd want to repair things between them quickly so they could go back to their normal lives.

As the hours ticked by, Maki found herself pacing around the cramped studio room she called home, skillfully dodging her sparse furniture thanks to her years of walking around in on the regular. Of course, when she walked around it most days she wasn't typically crying, her eyes puffy from how much she'd cried in such a short amount of time. Showing that much emotion and weakness was so unlike her, but Kaito quite literally meant the world to her and she didn't know how to handle what had happened other than by crying until her heart started to hurt less. But as the tears kept falling and the wails kept wailing, she realized that she wasn't going to make herself feel better by keeping herself locked up in her home, waiting for him to make the first move. If anything was going to be resolved, it would have to be her and her alone to take that step to repair the bridges that had been burned when she'd suggested that she pay for the date she'd set up from beginning to end.

Calling Kaito didn't just lead to a voicemail inbox, it went straight to it, which was completely unheard of when it came to him and trying to reach him. Usually when she'd call him she'd get an answer immediately, him greeting her with a cheerful "Heya, Maki Roll, what's going on?" that warmed her soul up from whatever coldness it had currently been experiencing. It would have been a total lie if she said she hadn't been hoping he'd have greeted her that way with that call, because all she wanted was for him to have forgiven what she'd done right away and pretended like he hadn't gotten mad, that they hadn't been yelling at each other, that everything was right in their relationship.

After several subsequent attempts at calling him, all of which were handled the same way, Maki came to the conclusion that in his anger, something had happened to Kaito on his way home and his phone had been shut off as to keep anyone from knowing where he was. It was irrational, as his phone was most likely off to keep her from calling and talking to him when they were both so heated, but she wasn't in her right mind at the moment. She needed to know where he was, to know he was fine and that they were fine and that everything in their lives was _fine_—she couldn't bring herself to admit that she'd had a large hand in making him leave like he had, and she wanted any excuse there was to set things straight. Without even giving herself time to calm down (which wouldn't happen anyway, she was too distraught at the idea of having lost Kaito in any capacity), she threw on her shoes, grabbed her wallet for identification and ran out her door, having zero idea where Kaito might have headed in his anger.

Him going back to his grandparents' house seemed too obvious, but the only place she knew he went that wasn't her apartment was to go spend time with Shuichi, and she didn't think that he'd throw his emotional turmoil onto his best friend's shoulders like that. He had to have gone somewhere else, somewhere that he wouldn't expect her to go looking for him, and that was where he'd fallen into whatever trouble he'd met; it wasn't a plan she'd put any thought into at all but Maki had a feeling that she knew where Kaito's destination would have been. There was one place that he always talked about going but never took her, citing that he wouldn't want to bore her with his special interest if she went there with him.

The planetarium was across town, and in the cool evening air it wasn't the smartest idea to walk there, but Maki didn't have much of a choice if she wanted to see if that's where her boyfriend was. She broke out into a sprint, the tears down her cheeks slowly drying at the same rate that sweat began to bead along her hairline, her long twintails streaming out behind her as she kept up her fast pace for as long as she could. Within half an hour she'd made it most of the way there, but she was out of breath and was barely able to keep walking at a brisk pace by that point.

A car very similar to the one Kaito drove pulled up next to her, and the passenger side window rolled down, as it slowed to a crawl to keep time with her. "Hey there miss, where do you think you're headed at this hour?" the driver asked, sounding gruff with each word. "It's dark and you're a pretty lady, shouldn't you be on the arm of a strong man or back home where you belong?"

As much as she would have liked to snap at the man that she could and would kill him if he tried anything, Maki was far too out of breath from her run that she couldn't do more than give him a rude gesture with one hand. "Oh, a funny girl, are you?" he replied, to which she held firm and continued giving the gesture. "I see, not interested in talking but you sure are interested in telling me to fuck myself, hm?"

At once she let the gesture go and tried picking up speed, but she was so tired that she couldn't get much faster and the man in the car could out-speed her anyway. He ended up cutting in front of her at the next intersection, where she could see the planetarium out in the distance, and when she flipped herself over his car to get away he was surprised, but didn't let her get too far without interference. He jumped out of the car and grabbed her, pinning her to the brick wall that made up the side of the building next to the road, his fingers lacing around her throat and squeezing slightly. Her eyes going wide, Maki reached for his wrist and tried pulling him off of her with both of her hands, but even her assassin-forged strength wasn't enough to get the man to let go of her. "You asked for this, you dirty woman," he sneered, unzipping his pants with his other hand, and no matter how much she kicked at him and tried prying him off of her, she couldn't stop him from whatever lewd act he was about to attempt.

She couldn't, but the shadowy figure popping up behind her could, clocking the man in the jaw and getting him to let go of her with the hand he'd been pinning her with. "Geez, you leave your girl alone for three hours and she gets herself turned into some dude's fantasy," Kaito said, shaking his fist out from the impact, while the man hurriedly stuffed himself back into his pants before attempting to square up with them both. But now that she wasn't so out of breath, or being pinned up by someone many times her size, Maki was able to get the upper hand and carefully incapacitate the guy, watching his bald, large head smack face-first against the brick wall he'd been trying to kill her on.

"Took you long enough to save me," she grumbled, wanting so badly to look at Kaito but feeling shame that he'd seen her in a weak position like she'd been in. "Some boyfriend you are, leaving me for dead like that."

"Last I checked, you were the one who came out here lookin' for me," Kaito replied, his eyes scanning around them and the darkened street, before they landed on the car the man had been driving, him bouncing a little at the sight. "Oh hey, followin' him worked in my favor! I was gonna walk to your place to see if you'd call the cops for me, since the dude carjacked me, but looks like you solved that problem on your own. Thanks, Maki Roll!"

Rather than accept his thanks, she rolled her eyes and, after stepping over the unconscious man on the sidewalk, turned to start her walk home. "Whatever, don't let it happen again. I'm going back to my place, don't follow me."'

She made it a few steps before Kaito was grabbing her arm, pulling her close into him despite her attempt to put distance between them. "He bruised you pretty good with how he was holding you," he remarked, using his other hand to cup her chin, lifting her head to see the dark red marks that stood out against her pale skin. "Betcha he was tryin' to choke you out, nasty asshole. I can't believe I caught him tryin' to jack off on ya, but the dude stole my car, guess there's no limits to what nasty shit he was about to do."

"Let go of me," she half-heartedly told him, not giving any effort whatsoever to get out of his grasp. The feeling of Kaito's hand on her chin was warming to her, and she could only somewhat remember the pain she'd just felt at his hands hours before while he was holding her so tenderly. He looked distraught that she said that, though, and so his hand pulled away and he jumped over to his car, motioning for her to follow him. Even though she didn't want to be alone with him in something of his control, walking home in the now-darkness was only grounds for more bad things going on in her life, and at least a car ride would give them the space needed to fix everything that had happened between them earlier in the night.

By the time they were outside her apartment building everything had been mostly smoothed over, Kaito had been told not to let his manly pride get in between him and his girlfriend, Maki had been told not to let her desire to be strong get in between her and her boyfriend, and things were almost back to normal. In fact, the only way they knew something had gone wrong was the nasty bruising on Maki's throat, and the awful stench of the carjacker that lingered in the car long after he'd been taken care of. Nothing was missing, nor was anything absolutely destroyed, but the memories of what they'd been through were not something that would easily go away.

Especially not the ones that came up whenever Kaito would gently, tenderly grab Maki by the chin and try pulling her closer to him for kisses.

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**A/N: I actually really liked this prompt! Anyway, requests are still open over at my Tumblr, so send me something off my bingo card if you're interested!**

**and next week we start having non-mmhr prompts, lol**


	3. Empty Shell - SDR2 Survivors

Things were horrible, and even saying that felt like a huge understatement. They'd known that the chance of anyone returning to the state of the living was slim to none, and yet they'd all sat around, waiting to see if their comatose friends ever came back to them. The days were long, the nights longer, as they watched lifeless bodies lay in stasis, kept alive only by machines that had ruined their consciousness and destroyed what had made them human. Yes, there was a lot that had happened before they'd all gotten put into the program, and not a single one of them was going to deny that perhaps it was for the best that they'd all been entered—but it was horrifying to know that they (and they alone) had been allowed to come back as better people, while their friends were left to rot as empty shells of who they were.

But that wasn't what was horrible about things, and no one was going to say that it couldn't get worse than having to wait until the end of time for bodies to ever come back to life, if they were going to. Because, in all honesty, the fact that they'd been stuck inside a simulation and watched some of these people get executed for committing murders against the others was worse than the fact that they were sitting, waiting around for corpses to suddenly become reanimated. It was hard to justify caring about some of these people, when they'd done such heinous things in the digital world, even if the people they were there were not necessarily the people they'd be if they woke up.

"Another day of no progress at all," Hajime remarked, after looking at the pods where everyone who hadn't made it back were still contained in their suspended existence. "Not a surprise, I guess, but it still bothers me that it's going like this."

"Shut the fuck up, we all know that what bothers you isn't that everyone's not waking back up," Fuyuhiko snapped in response, his spot naturally right next to the pod where his dearest Peko remained completely unaware of the devotion he was showing her. Ever since those who'd woken up had done so, he'd been hesitant to leave that spot for more than a few minutes, the only one of the group to choose to sleep there in the room with the shells of the lifeless rather than somewhere a little less dreary. He'd sworn himself to being her protector, to make up for all of the protecting she'd done for him, and he was dedicated to that decision even if she'd most likely never know of it. "It's that your little girlfriend's long gone, that's your whole problem, isn't it?"

"What? No, that's not it at all!" While it _was_ true that it did bother Hajime that Chiaki hadn't even been able to make it out of the simulation, he wasn't going to hold her in a higher regard than any of the others. Everyone meant something to someone, at least a little bit, and he was going to let his heart ache for everyone's losses, not just his own. "I'm tired of spending all of our time in here, it's starting to get depressing that they're not waking up."

"Nah, I think he's uppity that she's not here," Kazuichi cut in with a laugh, before he was met with several glares—his attempt at being in everyone's good graces falling flat. "I mean, who else is he gonna be uppity about? Nagito? We all knew ya loved the guy, but c'mon, have some respect for everyone else!"

Shaking his head, Hajime attempted to restate his claim that his problem had nothing to do with Chiaki and her lack of existence, but he was forced to remain silent when someone else took the floor instead. "If he didn't have respect for anyone else, do ya really think he'd still be here now?" Akane asked, leaning against the pod that had been her own when she'd been in the simulation. She was the person least-likely to hang around constantly, and was the one that everyone sent out to run errands to keep the rest of them alive and functional, but the gravity of the situation had weighed just as heavily on her as it had the others. Even though she'd always had a voracious appetite, ever since waking up there she'd been refusing to eat much, claiming to be on a hunger strike of sorts until everyone else was back alive. "If the three 'a you wanna fight about this, let's take it somewhere else, yeah?"

"Yes, if you want to fight you must leave this area at once!" Clasping her hands together to try and make herself sound more assertive, it was completely typical for Sonia to just mimic whatever had been said to get involved in conversations. She wasn't quite as devoted to constant vigilance as Fuyuhiko was, but she spent every waking moment at Gundham's unresponsive side, waiting for him to wake up so that they could continue living life as they had before he'd been executed. This was a point of contention unlike any other, and whenever she'd look longingly at him in his current state she'd set off Kazuichi and his obnoxious behavior, but that was to be expected. "We must be respectful of everyone that is in here, and fighting is no way to do it!"

"Thanks, ladies, but there's not going to be a fight," Hajime said after looking at the four he was there with, at how all of them were handling the fate that had been cast onto them. Sure, they had survived a killing game and gotten to go back to reality, but the cost of that was steeper than any of them were aware, and it had affected each of them differently. One refused to leave the side of the person who'd always been at his, one refused to eat more than what was necessary until everyone else could eat, one wished for interactions that were never going to happen the same, and one had become more combative in trying to handle everything that was going on. And then there was him, a person who didn't actually exist before but existed now, and didn't know what to do beyond wish for something that was never going to happen.

In a sense, they were all nearly empty shells of the people they'd been while inside the game, to contrast with the completely empty ones they were watching over, and there was little to no hope that things were going to change.


	4. Hair Matted with Blood - Kyoko

The crime scene was gruesome to look at, but it wasn't anything that Kyoko wasn't accustomed to seeing whenever she was sent on a special job like the one she was currently on. All she'd been told before arriving was that it was most likely the work of a serial killer, particularly one her detective agency had been tracking for months, but that it went beyond the typical aspects of the killer's crimes, especially with where the bodies were located. She shrugged that warning off, figuring that the smarmy man telling her that was doing it to make her break her cool, and she sent off to the scene without any further to-do, something that she came to somewhat regret. The scene itself wasn't the issue, nor was the mutilated bodies laying in the empty living room, but the smell of blood and gore was absolutely revolting, and just the initial breath she'd taken of the smell was enough to make her feel wary of it.

Even though she was already wearing gloves, Kyoko's first act was to slip on a pair of disposable ones over hers before bending down to begin investigating the scene. The smell was going to get to her if she waited around for too long, and she didn't want to risk tampering with the scene by cracking open a window, so she decided that a quick check of everything before going outside to get fresh air was the best course of action. Every body that was there fit the normal description of the murders that their serial killer was responsible for, so it wasn't like it could be a copycat murderer or anything of the sort, and that made the investigation a lot easier than it would have been had they been completely different murders, but it still wasn't fast enough.

By the time she'd checked three bodies—not even all of the ones in the room, sadly—she found herself getting light-headed and knew she needed to get outside sooner rather than later. As she stood up, her legs began to buckle underneath her, and she had to move quickly to get out to some fresh air, but her movements were sluggish and unlike her, and she found herself getting disoriented, unable to find the exit from the house. The last thing she remembered was slumping against a wall, looking around with a darkening gaze, trying to figure out which way was which, how she was meant to get out of the place, but her eyes slowly closed and she slid to the floor, her chest getting tighter and tighter with every breath she took.

When she woke back up, she was still in the house, but not where she'd fallen asleep; she had been moved over to the room where all of the corpses were located, the stench of death assaulting her face even harder than it had been before. She attempted to get up, but found herself pinned down by something, which to her horror was a dead body that had been deposited on top of her in her sleep. Screaming in that situation was unlike Kyoko, but she didn't know what else to do, and if anything she could get someone's attention and see what was going on in the house of horrors.

There was no response to her cry for help, and she was left pushing the body off of herself, knowing that if she were to investigate it she'd have to explain that she'd moved it for personal reasons and that all evidence could then be questioned. Her clothes were soaked with the blood that had dripped from the corpse onto her while she'd been pinned under it, and she smelled just as bad as the room she was in. "What kind of nonsense place is this?" she asked, looking around as she sat up and saw that more bodies had appeared in the time she'd been asleep. "Who's using this house to store their murder victims, and why?"

When she stood up, she could feel blood running down the back of her neck, and with her hand she reached back to check what the source was; it turned out that she'd been laying in a puddle of someone else's blood and it was in her hair, and due to how she'd been unwillingly moved her hair had become matted with it, even though the mats were easy to break apart with her fingers. At once the realization hit her that she needed to leave, to get out and get herself cleaned off, the potential of infection from someone else's blood in this place far too high for her liking. She'd have to come back with a couple other investigators to give the place a more thorough examination, and hopefully by then the killer would stop dumping corpses there in the room.

But leaving wasn't actually an option for Kyoko, she soon found out, as every time she attempted to find the door she found herself back in that room, with more bodies that were collecting and piling up around her whenever she woke up. Each time was a new, more disorienting experience, as she couldn't figure out why she was falling asleep as she made her way out and couldn't explain how she kept ending up underneath corpses. With every return to the room her clothes and hair got grungier, until she looked like she belonged among the dead rather than the living, and she wasn't able to say how long she'd been there or how she'd managed to stay alive while in captivity. Certainly she needed to be starving, or on the brink of death, but ultimately she felt fine, aside from needing to bathe for hours.

It took nearly a dozen attempts for her to realize that she needed to ask for outside help in some way that wasn't screaming out, but her phone had disappeared off of her person when she went checking for it—and gone too were all of her notes about the case and the murders she'd been sent to investigate. Kyoko was being held captive by the serial killer she was supposed to be tracking, she could almost guarantee it, and all she could do at that point was wait for him to grow bored with her and set her free, or kill her and call it done. There was a third option as well, but she figured that if no one had come looking for her yet it wasn't ever going to happen, and she wasn't going to rely on outside forced to be her savior.

As she found herself in another loop of falling asleep and waking up among the dead, she ended up thinking about the life she'd led up until the morning she'd taken the case and gone to investigate the house. She'd never admit it to anyone, not even herself, but she was lonely being such a high-profile detective, having isolated herself because she'd put her work before anyone else, and she somewhat wished she could go back to having friends and a potential significant other in her life. If she could ever make it out alive, she'd reach out to the people she'd cut out of her daily life and try to bring them back, if they hadn't already moved on without her. That thought was lovely, but it seemed so far-fetched that she felt a bit strange thinking about it, especially when she thought about reaching out to the guy she'd had a somewhat-romantic exchange with a time or two. Just the idea of being able to hold his hand in hers and confess her one-time feelings to him made her fingers tense up, the feeling that he was already squeezing her hand overtaking her for some reason.

That was when she really woke up, in the house where she'd been trapped all along, several members of the police standing over her and paramedics shining a flashlight into her eyes. "This home was condemned for poor ventilation, you should never have walked in here without a protective mask, or without opening all windows," one of the officers explained, while she was helped to her feet there in the room with the multiple dead bodies, the exact number that had been there all along. "It's a miracle you weren't killed from the air in here, miss Kirigiri. Be more careful next time."

"How long was I out?" she asked, realizing that she had no idea how long she'd actually been inside the house, and no one was able to give her a solid answer until she heard what time and day it was, to realize she'd been out cold inside the house for nearly twelve hours, which wasn't too long but still long enough to warrant going to the hospital for further evaluation. As she was escorted out, she recounted what she could remember of her hallucinations during her time she was asleep, and while she spoke she idly reached for her head, finding that her hair was still matted with the blood that she'd felt before, and her clothes were still drenched with the dark liquid.

How much that had happened to her was real after all, and how much of it had just been a dream? She couldn't tell, and yet she wasn't going to let such an inconvenience stop her from bringing the serial killer to justice in the future, especially now that he'd personally robbed her of half a day and covered her in someone else's blood.

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**A/N: happy late birthday, Kyoko! sorry for doing this to you but that's just how it goes c:**


	5. Fake Kill Scare - Maki

It was already past sunset when Maki finally made her way back to her dorm building, the paper she'd been writing finished and submitted at the cost of her entire day off having been spent getting it done. She hated writing essays on current events, especially when she was explicitly forbidden from writing anything about murder or death at her instructor's request, and she'd struggled to find something "clean" and "appropriate" to write about, to the point that most of her time in the library had been spent looking up different local news stories to find one she could get the required length out of.

The heavy front door to the building hadn't fully closed behind her when she realized that she was stepping inside somewhere that had only half of its usual lights on. "Don't tell me that someone's getting into the creepy festive mood early," she grumbled, rolling her eyes at the thought of someone wanting to spook people and using the whole building as part of their prank. "I swear, if I'm walking upstairs and I hear that meathead scream, I'm turning around and walking out to sleep somewhere else." Sometimes she hated that she'd been assigned to the building that was primarily housing boys, rather than the one across the campus that was mostly ladies, and their childish antics was a large contributing factor to that feeling. Even though she cared deeply about some of the boys she lived alongside (she hated that Kaito was the first to come to mind, followed moments later by Shuichi), she couldn't stand the majority of them, and none of them exactly tried to get into her good graces anyway.

She started heading up the stairs, needing to go up two flights before getting to her floor, and as she began to ascend she noticed that the narrow staircase was already decorated with cobwebs and fake spiders for the upcoming holiday. "Can't quite get why these guys spend their time decorating everything when they've got classes to pass, but whatever. Their time being wasted, not mine." Maki's grumbling tone had not changed even slightly, and she was more annoyed than anything by the time she got to her floor to find the lights dimmed to almost black and the hallway covered in more creepy-crawlies and webbing.

Pulling her phone out to use it as a flashlight, Maki was greeted immediately by a clearly plastic corpse that was sprawled out across the floor, which did nothing but irritate her. She kicked it aside, listening to it thud against the wall and hopefully let whoever had that room know that there was a pretend murder scene outside their door, before she started running down the hall, wanting to get to her dorm as fast as she could to get out of the nonsense. But as she passed a door slightly ajar, she stopped in her tracks, her blood running cold at the eerie silence coming from that room.

It was Kaito's room, and she knew above anything else that he hated the undead, ghosts, and anything that went _boo_ in the dark, and if his door was open and she wasn't hearing him blubbering like a baby, something was very much wrong. She pushed the door open without bothering to knock and found the room to be filled with fog, which enveloped her face and started making her choke on how thick it was. "Kaito! Where are you?" she called, trying to brush the smoke away with a rapidly-waiving hand, as she flashed her phone's light around to see if she could see anything. "Come on, answer me, damn it!"

All she got was the silence, which made her worry more. She'd never showed this kind of care towards him before, and if he was actually around he'd be teasing her nonstop about how protective she was acting, but all she could think about was how someone was trying to kill him by spooking him.

And that was when she stepped forward and tripped over something on the floor. She stumbled, her phone falling from her hand as she had to catch herself before she hit the ground, and right as she was about to call out about how annoying falling was, she noticed what it was that she'd tripped over. It wasn't that Maki wasn't familiar with death and dead bodies—after all, she'd spent so much of her life doing assassin work that she was used to seeing dead people in front of her—but to see someone that she knew laying dead in a pile of their own blood was not what she was expecting. Her mouth felt dry as she tried to scream for someone to come help her, the smoke and shock of seeing this person on the floor getting to her, and even though she didn't care for who was laying there, she reached over and started shaking their shoulders, trying to show that they were dead.

Thanks to the darkness and the smoke in the room, she couldn't see the smile cracking on the so-called corpse's lips, followed almost immediately by the words "Hiya, Maki Roll", delivered in such a manner that made her drop the shoulders she was holding. "Aw, what's the matter, don't like a little spook? I was trying to get Kaito with this but the scaredy-cat didn't even come in, he saw the smoke and said he was going to Shuichi's room, which was super lame. Didn't even get the—ouch!" Kokichi was interrupted by a strong slap across his face, which left his cheeks stinging.

"I can't believe you'd try doing that to him," she snapped, slapping him a second time before finding where her phone had gotten thrown to, checking to make sure that its screen hadn't cracked before heading back towards the door, kicking Kokichi a couple times for good measure before stepping over him. "You're a complete asshole, I hope you know, and next time I find you in a pool of blood it better be your own."

"You're so rude, Maki Roll!" he whined, still laying on the ground. "You're just a big bully who doesn't get a good joke!"

"I get plenty of jokes!" She thought that Kokichi's fake death scene was stupid and wasn't worth the time or effort of telling anyone about it, but she knew she needed to warn Kaito about the not-so-gory details of what was happening in his room. "You're just not worth the time, loser. That, and if you call me Maki Roll again, I _will_ make sure that I'm the one that puts you in that puddle of blood."

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**A/N: a more lighthearted prompt, but that's okay!**


	6. Parting Words Regret - Ibuki

If there was one thing that could consistently be said about Ibuki's concerts, it was that they were always a blast to be at, whether as a spectator or as a performer. She did a lot of solo shows, which were characterized by high energy screaming and singing and dancing every which-way across the stage, but she enjoyed it best whenever she could get some fellow musicians to work alongside her for a song or two, even if all the songs were of her own creation. Being in one of Ibuki's shows was stepping into her little world, it was to be expected that she'd be strict on the rules.

The only other notably big thing about her concerts was that she always made it a point to invite all of her friends to every show that she could, provided that she was performing locally and that she wasn't going to have to pay for any additional costs. That was something that drove her business manager insane, because she was constantly begging him for tickets for upwards of fifteen people at once, pleading that she couldn't do a show without her biggest fans and former classmates, and he would always look her in the eyes and tell her that her requests were impossible but he'd try his best (and somehow always succeeded with zero issues that she was aware of). Ibuki loved having that sort of power to get what she wanted when it came to her concerts, figuring them to be a giant perk of being such a star performer, but she never would have guessed that she would see the darker side of that somewhat-abuse of the power.

It came before one of the biggest shows she'd ever been part of, a headlining act on the Saturday of a weekend-long festival for musicians of similar taste to her, and Ibuki was beyond excited to be in such a wonderful position. "It's not every day that Ibuki can say she's the most famous person in a place full of famous people," she remarked as she looked out at some of the other stages and their notable performances happening on them, before closing the curtains looking out onto the festival so that she could start getting ready for her upcoming show. "It's kind of, I don't know, amazing? to be in this kind of position! Ibuki loves the attention!"

As she clapped her hands together excitedly, the couple of friends she'd invited backstage with her all exchanged a worried glance between them. "Yeah, uh, I don't know if you should be letting all of this fame get to your head," Mahiru said, fiddling anxiously with the camera around her neck. "It's not like you're the biggest name here, you're just the headliner today. I'm sure a lot of people haven't actually heard of you before."

"Ooh, and if they haven't, they'll think you're just some cocky slut based on how you're acting!" Hiyoko chimed in, ignoring Mahiru's attempt at pointing out their friend's misgivings in a civil manner to get digs in at her. "I'm sure I'd never have heard of you if we hadn't gone to school together, so don't assume that everyone else knows who you are!"

Laughing at their comments, Ibuki replied, "Okay, well, people are here today just to see me, that's the truth and we all know it. The festival wouldn't have asked for Ibuki Mioda and her one-woman band to be a headliner if no one had heard of her, don't you think?"

"She's completely right, and how lucky it is for her to be given this opportunity to grace everyone's presence with her special form of music!" Also laughing, but in a much more sinister way than she had been, Nagito clasped his hands together and let his laughter slowly fade into silence, the ambient noise of the rest of the festival filling their ears for a moment. "I wouldn't be surprised if something great happened for Ibuki tonight, to show her just how famous she really is!"

"See, Nagito gets it!" Ibuki cheered, thankful that she'd given a pass to someone who appreciated her talent and saw things her way. "I'm seriously the most famous person here, and everyone who's here for my show is going to get their world rocked here once it starts, just you wait and see!" At that, she motioned for the trio to go ahead and leave the backstage area, so that her preparations for her set could begin, and without any hesitation her personal security entourage moved to escort them out of the area. If Ibuki had known what was about to transpire in the following minutes, perhaps she would have let them stick around a bit longer than she had, but she was completely unaware of what was about to happen.

It came when she was just about to take the stage, standing right at the stairs behind the curtain when her manager came up to talk to her. "Hello, miss Mioda," he greeted, sound altogether way too professional but it wasn't anything that was out of the ordinary for him. "I assume you're plenty ready for your performance?"

"Hell yeah I am!" she replied, bouncing where she stood. "Ibuki is always ready to show off her talents to the world!"

"I figured you would say that, but unfortunately that may not be in the cards for you after all." As he spoke, Ibuki felt what was undoubtedly something metal and cold press up against the back of her neck, but she didn't dare to turn to see what it was. She felt herself freezing up at the contact, which was completely unexpected coming from the man who'd directed her career for so long. She was completely in the dark about why he was going to try and harm her when she was about to take the stage, but she knew she had people watching this happen behind her—why wasn't anyone coming to help

"Will you please let Ibuki at least go on stage before you kill her?" she asked, hoping that she could get some kind of sympathy from him before he did what he wanted with her, especially since no one seemed to be on her side during this. "The people here, they _paid_ to see Ibuki Mioda perform, they should get what they asked for!"

He chuckled before replying, "They'll be able to see you perform, certainly, but it may no longer be live." In the second before he pulled the trigger on her, Ibuki's only regret was not that she wasn't going to be headlining after all, but that she hadn't had a lovely exchange with her friends before shoo-ing them away. Her biggest supporters, and she'd pushed them aside because she wanted more than they thought she was going to get, and sadly they'd been right.

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**A/N: no I don't know why this one turned out like this, but it did and I only slightly regret it.**


	7. Arm in a Sling - Kyoko and Makoto

The sling wasn't anywhere close to comfortable, but it wasn't meant to be, Makoto decided after trying to move his arm out of it and feeling the splitting pain at his collarbone. It was embarrassing beyond explanation how he'd managed to snap the bone, trying to play a gallant white knight for someone who could've easily held her own had he let her, but he had to wear the damage with pride. Kyoko hadn't been prepared to walk on the ice in her heeled boots, and when she slipped he'd kind of let his instincts take over to try and stop her from falling, which promptly resulted in him falling underneath her. It may have cushioned her fall, but it certainly didn't do anything for him but give him a broken collarbone that needed time and babying to heal.

"You know, if you keep trying to get out of it, they're going to keep you in it longer," Kyoko said as she saw what her boyfriend was attempting to do. He froze and looked at her sheepishly, giving her a smile that tried masking the pain he'd caused himself, but she was far too aware of what he was feeling to buy it. "I think we'd both have been better off if you'd let me fall without you stepping in. I can handle bruises, I can't handle having to be your watchdog to make sure your sling stays on."

"H-hey, no one said you had to do that!" he retorted, feeling his face begin to warm at the way she was talking to him. "I just wanted to see how bad it would hurt if I tried moving, I'm not planning on taking this thing off unless I have to for a long time. Can't go through life with my collarbone in two, after all."

She shook her head, unamused with his response, before looking back at the casefile she'd brought over to his apartment with her. "I'm sorry that you managed to fracture your clavicle trying to be a gentleman, but that was all your doing, and I suppose if you want me to let you make things worse, that's…no, that's still all your doing."

"Thanks for the support, Kyoko. You're really helping me here." It wasn't that Makoto was annoyed with how she was acting, but rather that she wasn't trying to find any light in the situation that barely impacted her in the first place. If she had fallen on her own and injured herself somehow, she would have undoubtedly blamed him for the whole thing, but him stepping in to keep her safe had ended up with him being blamed for it all anyway. He had no intentions of prolonging his time spent with the injury unhealed, and he was going to follow all the doctor's orders to make sure that it healed properly and promptly—and that included keeping his arm in the sling exactly like he was supposed to.

But just because _he_ knew that, didn't mean that Kyoko knew as well, and for being quite observant and knowledgeable about most things, knowing her boyfriend's true intentions in the situation was not something she was prepared to deal with. "No one ever told you that you needed to jump to help me whenever possible," she continued, still focusing on the part where he'd slid on the same ice that she'd lost traction on rather than noticing that he was long since past that, "and now you have to pay the price for it. That sling better not come off of that arm again, Makoto. That's a warning."

"Right, right, I'll listen to you, sorry for not doing it sooner." He heard her give a loud huff before she went back to giving her work her full attention, rather than watching him staring at her with an almost unhappy expression. She was treating him like this out of concern and care, he was aware of those intentions, but he really did not like her being so stern with him when he was injured simply out of wanting to keep her safe.

They didn't bring up the minor argument again until the next time she thought she saw him taking his arm out of the sling, but all he'd been doing was adjusting how it was sitting so that it didn't slide so much. She wasn't angry by any means, but there was a sense of disappointment just radiating off of Kyoko's face as she scolded him once more about needing to keep the thing on, and it was enough to make Makoto honestly regret being so kind to his girlfriend when he thought she needed it.

But things never changed, and the weather never warmed up enough to clear all paths of ice, and so when she went rushing out to get to a crime scene in her miniskirt and boots that weren't right for the weather, he had to stand back idly and listen as she inevitably slipped and fell on the icy sidewalk. When she picked herself up, her first instinct was to turn back towards the front of their house, seeing her boyfriend standing in the doorway with his eyes trying to avoid hers, and her lips parted slightly to try and say _something_, but no words ever properly formed. He eventually found himself meeting eyes with her, and his response was to lift his non-slinged arm and give her a small wave, which she frowned at.

The next day she had a swollen ankle to ice and a bruised hand that she kept outside of its glove for the first time in forever, and her injuries barely could compare to the still-painful one that Makoto was dealing with, which only made him wish more than he hadn't helped her the first time. "It may be a good thing we have no plans for today," she said to him after he'd helped her get an ice pack wrapped around her ankle, which was a nasty purple in spots and had ballooned up twice its usual size. "I don't think I could walk much on this, let alone drive, and with your arm still needing to be in the sling we wouldn't be able to go anywhere at all."

"That's fine by me," he replied, realizing that wishing injury on her was stupid and that he'd rather suffer twice than have to watch her suffer at all, and he carefully tucked himself into sitting next to her, being wary of his ailments and making sure to avoid touching her as well. "I think we could use a nice day to sit here and relax, just the two of us. No work, no commitments, just each other for company."

"Sappy, are we?" Kyoko looked at him with a neutral expression, her lips in a straight line, but when he shrugged with the one good shoulder he could move her face turned into a smile. "Good to see you're being mindful of your injury. I would hate to see it get worse for something as simple as a shrug."

He laughed, before leaning his head over onto her shoulder. "I'm getting better about keeping it in mind, last thing I want is to disappoint you by making it worse."

"Then even though we're relaxing, that arm stays in the sling."

"Wouldn't have it any other way, Kyoko."


	8. Came Back Wrong - Mahiru and Hiyoko

The act of bringing people back from the dead, in most cases, was completely impossible. Sure, there were instances of people being considered dead (because their heart stopped and they ceased living for a little while) only to be brought back through medical means, but those people hadn't been corpses left bleeding out for their friends to discover. Those people hadn't actually, legitimately been dead for weeks just to rise once more, they'd only been dead for a short amount of time and faced no ill consequences in their return to the living.

But for those few poor, unfortunate people who were able to reawaken in the living world after spending considerable amounts of time among the dead, things were often worse than they had been before they'd met their end. The moment that they'd managed to get Mahiru back to life, everyone who'd been a part of the process cheered and rejoiced, happy to see a former friend returned to her previous state. She stared blankly at all of them hugging and crying at her presence, unable to express anything but a neutral expression even in such a happy time; it quickly became clear that she was void of any and all emotions, and that while her mind was back to how it had been before her death, she had retained some sort of injury to her brain that completely shut off how to feel just about anything.

As the others who'd died in the simulation were brought back, they too would show traits that showed they had retained some sort of consequence as to what had happened to them in the game, but none of them were quite as prominent as Mahiru's inability to feel any emotions beyond blankness. There were scars to be shown, the occasional invisible gash suddenly popping open and needing to be stitched up to keep someone from dying again, but those were all seen as battle wounds, as markers of pride—and while everyone ooh-ed and aah-ed over them, Mahiru was left sitting alone, holding a camera in her hands and watching everyone experiencing things that she couldn't comprehend.

When Hiyoko returned to the world of the living, she too was different than she had been before she'd died, in a way that contradicted Mahiru's entire issue. She was still as mean as ever, death not having stripped her of her habit of being downright nasty to those around her (and she still favored bullying the resurrected Mikan above all, though it was rightfully deserved), but the moment she saw Mahiru and her camera staring at her, almost as if she saw right through her, she burst into giant alligator tears and tackled her. "Mahiru, I mi-i-issed you!" she wailed, squeezing her as tightly as she could with her short arms. "I'm so glad we get to see each other again!"

And Mahiru, unable to understand why Hiyoko was crying, or why she was being hugged, merely snapped a picture with her camera and waited until she was released to show it to her subject. Hiyoko's face went pale at the sight of what was on screen, and she screamed in horror, backing away from Mahiru even faster than she'd tackled her in the first place. "Why…are you here?" Mahiru slowly asked, turning the camera back around and taking a second picture of Hiyoko, who was trying to get away as fast as she could, finding someone else to hide behind. "Why did you touch me?"

"I didn't know touching you was off limits!" Hiyoko replied, having found a spot behind a couple of the others who had been talking, but were now watching what was happening with wild eyes. "I just saw you and I remembered…you were so nice to me, you helped me get dressed and you were kind and I missed you, so I hugged you, and now you're showing me icky pictures of corpses!"

"You are a corpse." Mahiru's reply came with her taking long, drawn-out steps to chase Hiyoko down, her being stopped by the arms of several others who were confused about what was going on. As more hands grabbed her, she began taking more pictures, chanting the word _corpse_ over and over again in her lifeless, dull voice. After several moments of it Hiyoko began crying again, screeching that she wanted it to stop, and only when Mahiru was restrained and taken back to the corner she'd often sat in alone did she calm back down.

It was confusing to all what was going on, but no one could really explain why Mahiru was insistent that Hiyoko was still dead, until they'd managed to get her camera out of her hands to see what she was apparently seeing. As it turned out, Mahiru's camera saw the world exactly as it would be if people hadn't been brought back to life, and everyone she took a picture of who was a reanimated body looked like they had before they'd been brought back, a dead corpse in the world of the living, and that combined with her inability to feel anything had made for a rude awakening when Hiyoko had hugged her.

So in her time while she'd been dead, Mahiru had transformed from someone who was moderately against men and their behavior, to someone who had no emotions and couldn't be interacted with by anyone who'd tasted death before. While that seemed like a fairly easy thing to cope with, the number of people there who could talk to her was severely limited, as she would start chanting _corpse_ any time that Hiyoko or any of the others came near, and if it was someone who'd just been talking to one of them, they had to hope it wasn't someone who'd touched them, or Mahiru's camera would show that their skin was decayed from the touch of the formerly dead.

The act of bringing people back from the dead was nearly impossible, and the survivors of Jabberwock Island had someone managed to make it happen, but at the cost of at least one person coming back completely wrong—and with all of the issues, it seemed that it would have been better for them all if Mahiru's body had stayed dead the whole time.

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**A/N: I may have taken the past month off from updating this due to NaNoWriMo, but I'm back! or, anyway, I'm back for as long as I have requested prompts, which is...not very long, oops**


	9. Doesn't Realize They've Been Injured

Whatever had exploded, it had done so with enough force to shatter just about all of the windows in the dorm building, rudely awakening the students who lived there to find a world full of dust, smoke, and shards of glass in their faces. The sound of sirens filled the air almost instantly, mixing with the ringing in the students' ears as they scrambled to get shoes on and get out of the building, in case it was about to collapse from any damage it may have sustained. Kaede had been quick to jump out of her bed and get dressed appropriately to leave, but she was busy looking through her belongings trying to find irreplaceable sheet music that she didn't want to potentially lose when a second explosion happened in the distance, the rumble overpowering the sound of the sirens and temporarily deafening her to anything happening directly around her.

She was dazed by the strange sounds that the second explosion left lingering in her head, but she was able to push through it when she felt someone grab her shoulder, trying to pull her from the box of music she was still looking through. Her eyes lifted from the box as she turned to see Kaito, half-dressed and his hair soaking wet and flat against his head, motioning for her to follow him. She gave a firm shake of her head, motioning back towards the box and his eyes widened, waving his hands for her to stop what she was doing, and she groaned (although the sound didn't even sound right in her head, so she didn't know what, if anything, he heard from it). He took in a deep breath, coughing as he did due to the kicked up dust that was flying through the bedroom, before he pushed her aside, grabbed the whole box, and began making his way towards the door, her following him out without any further protests now that she knew all of her music was going to be safe.

By the time they made it outside of the building, a third explosion had rocked the building, sending some ceiling tiles crashing to the ground that they had to dodge as they ran through the halls and down the stairs. Once they were under the starry and smoky sky, Kaito set the box of music down and bowed his head towards Kaede, who looked at him with the same amount of confusion she'd had when he'd first shown up in her room. "I'm going to go back in to see if anyone else is still in there!" he yelled at her with a grin, his face and bare shoulders noticeably caked with the debris from the ceiling that had fallen on them, and she wondered what it was she looked like. "You're the last one from upstairs, so don't worry, I won't be gone too long!" He turned and ran back into the building, leaving her speechless for a moment before she realized what was going on.

"Kaito, wait!" she called after his retreating form, but he was too far to be heard with the sirens around them. She looked at the box he'd brought, which had collected as much dirt as his skin had, and a weary smile appeared on her lips, thankful that if anything at all, her priceless music collection had survived the night.

"Let me guess, Kaito ran in and got you out?" It was Maki's voice behind Kaede, and she turned to give her a nod, not sure what else she was supposed to say. "Figures. By the time him and Gonta had ran over here from the boys' dorm, it was just me and Miu out here, and now just about everyone's gotten out and…"

"And?" Kaede replied, hoping to draw out the rest of the statement, but Maki shrugged. "Come on, there's got to be more to it than that."

"We're trying to figure out who's missing still, and I think we've got just about everyone. Gonta checked their dorm and determined everyone's out from it, but Kaito decided he'd take care of the girls' dorm rather than let, say, me do it." That was when Maki looked at the box by Kaede's feet, and she went to say something about it when they heard a loud rumbling closer than any before had been, not an explosion but rather the sound of the building beginning to collapse. They acted in a split-second, both grabbing the box and running as far as they could, Maki leading the way to where the large group of students had gathered in the night, some shivering from the cold and others eyes focused on behind the building, where a giant plume of smoke and the occasional flame was visible.

After catching her breath for just a moment, Kaede let her eyes drift off of that plume of smoke and instead focused on the building they'd just been standing by, finding that part of it—the part with her room—had crumbled and had fallen down onto itself, leaving the rest standing over the rubble. Her heart sank when she thought about what she'd seen right before she'd been approached by Maki, and after scanning the group she mumbled, "Oh god, Kaito was still in there, I really hope he—"

"That's where Himiko's room was!" Tenko yelled, grabbing her head with one hand while pointing towards the partially-collapsed building with the other. Kaede knew exactly which room had belonged to Himiko, it had been the one right below the one across the hall from her own, which made sense given that Kaito _had_ said that everyone was out from upstairs, but if Himiko was still inside, it was completely possible that the two of them were trapped inside. After the initial weight of what Tenko had pointed out stopped being quite as heavy, several people began to charge towards the building, but others grabbed them to hold them into place. The only one who was allowed to go was Tenko, because she was too quick for anyone to stop.

She only made it a few steps before another rumble shook them all, the smoke and flames in the distance growing larger, and she fell to the ground, punching the grass with her fists. "Geez, whoever let their lab explode really decided they should take the whole campus with them," Maki grumbled, before looking around at everyone and their shell-shocked faces. "Come on, let's get away from here before the whole building comes down. I bet the cafeteria is far enough from the explosions that we'll be safe in there, and maybe we'll meet with everyone else who we're missing along the way.

The only person who actually heard her say anything was Kaede, because they were standing side-by-side still holding the box of music, but the upperclassmen scattered among their group had already decided they were going to find shelter somewhere as well, so it seemed like that was the plan. Even Tenko picked herself up and began walking with everyone, knowing that it was better to be safe than to be dead. "Hey, where's everyone going?" a voice called from behind them, causing the people who recognized it to stop and turn to see Kaito running towards them, Himiko asleep in his arms. "Wait for me, she's really heavy on these tired arms!"

"He survived?" both Kaede and Maki asked each other, looking between them before waiting for Kaito to catch back up. All three of them had full arms so no one could joyfully hug anyone else, but they could at least see his resilient grin as he came up to them, calling for Tenko to come and grab her little friend so that he could get a second to breathe.

He didn't really say much to either person waiting for him, just telling them to walk in front of him so he didn't hold anyone back, and in the heat of the moment they obliged. He took a few minutes to regain some of his strength before he was bolting out in front of everyone else, nearly toppling some people over as he charged to lead as much of the pack as he could. In the ladies' minds he was a knuckleheaded hero who'd saved lives that would easily have been lost in the building's collapse, but no one really knew how they were going to address that with him. At the moment what seemed to be most important was making sure everyone was alive and that they still weren't missing anyone.

It became clear that the cafeteria was the spot that most people had thought of when they needed to get to safety, and it was upon arriving there that they were able to find the people who lived in their dorm building, as well as the ones around it, who hadn't been present for the initial explosion. When Kaede and Maki came inside, still holding the box of music, they heard someone calling for them; after locating where the voice was coming from they saw that it was Shuichi, his hat covered entirely in thick dust, waving them down and requesting their presence. As they got closer to him they saw Kaito sitting on the floor in front of him, his face dusty as well as bloodied—something that neither of them had noticed when he'd valiantly ran out of the building. "What's with the long faces?" Kaito asked them, clearly unaware of what they were looking at. "I know this whole situation sucks, but we're alive, aren't we?"

"W-when did you get hit?" Kaede blurted out in response, despite Shuichi motioning for them to not say anything about the potential injury, and Kaito looked at her quite confused about what she'd said. "Your head, it's bleeding, you must've gotten hit by something…"

"Yeah, I took a ceiling tile to the head the first time I ran into your dorm building, guess I never stopped to think that it could've cut me." Reaching up to feel where the blood was coming from, Kaito's hand was stopped by Shuichi grabbing it, not wanting him to rub more dust into an already-dirtied wound. "I'll be fine, though, no worries! A building trying to fall on me didn't stop the Luminary of the Stars, so what's a little scrape gonna do?"

With how much blood was freely pouring down his face at that point, soaking his hair and running in little rivers down his jaw, it was clear that the injury was a bit more than just a little scrape, and with all of the dirt and dust around there was plenty that the scrape could end up doing. Needless to say, when paramedics descended upon the cafeteria to check for any injuries, he was the first to be pushed in their direction, hailed as a hero by those he'd saved and recognized as a complete idiot for risking his own life multiple times to save others. The fact that he'd managed to do everything he had with an inch-deep gash across the top of his head and a severe concussion to go along with it, that just made his actions all the more heroic and stupid at the same time.

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**A/N: some people _really_ love to see Kaito suffer, lol**


	10. Sports Injury - Akane

Akane's title of Ultimate Gymnast was one that was always up for debate, because no one could really say they'd _seen_ her do anything worthy of such a lofty title, let alone anything remotely gymnastics-like. She would scrunch her face, think about all of the times she'd done back handsprings off of buildings for quick cash, and then shrug off the criticism since she knew what she was capable of, it wasn't her fault that all of her classmates didn't know what they were talking about.

But sometimes, the needling and heckling about her not being good enough would get to her, and she'd spend the next day or two dwelling over how she wished she could prove her talent's worth to everyone, but couldn't for reasons that she didn't like thinking about. She was flexible, she was strong, she could out-cartwheel anyone in a duel, but she knew that opening up that opportunity would get people to challenge her to harder and harder tasks that she would be able to do—for a price.

"Aw, c'mon guys, don't you know that I really am a gymnast?" she cut in one time when the majority of the class was teasing her for being so lax on showing off her talent to the rest of them. "'t least I can prove it, unlike some of ya with your 'Yakuza' this and your 'princess' that, I've got the skills to show off if I haveta."

"Then why don't you put your money where your mouth is and fucking do it?" Fuyuhiko snapped, not liking that he'd been directly called out in her statement. "Bet you actually can't and you're just talkin' a big game, huh?"

"No way, I can do it, you just…haveta understand that what I can do may not, I'unno, match what you think a gymnast is?" Already regretting throwing her voice into the fire, Akane hoped that everyone would brush her off and let things go, but then the chanting started for her to accept the challenge and show them what she was capable of, and she knew that she was in big trouble. "Okay, okay, I'll do it, but you've gotta let me prep first! It really ain't the best idea to have me do this on an empty stomach or without stretching or—"

"Excuses, excuses. Get to flipping or I'll fuckin' kill ya!" Cracking his knuckles and looking at her with the fiercest expression his babyface could wear, Fuyuhiko clearly meant business, and Akane knew that she was in big trouble if she couldn't prepare first.

But there was really no talking out an agreement for her display of flexibility and gracefulness, and she was given exactly enough time to go change into something that wouldn't allow for a wardrobe malfunction before she had to take the stage. The decided-upon arena was around the resort pool, and while everyone took their spots to see her performance, she was left praying to whatever god wanted to claim her that things wouldn't end in disaster. She did a couple stretches in front of everyone, showing off her ability to touch her toes with (relative) ease, getting her legs up high enough that her feet passed her head, things that would hopefully help her as she did a few tumbling passes to get everyone off her case.

There was just one issue with Akane taking the bait and accepting the challenge that had been thrown at her: she hadn't been medically cleared to do full routines in _years_. Basic gymnast things, she could do in her sleep and do it without injury, but after she'd done those she was met with an unenthusiastic crowd begging her for something cooler. Anything that involved flipping and bounding and didn't have one limb on the ground at almost all times (so, anything more technical than a roundoff), she ran the risk of hurting herself and she knew it. But she was stubborn and wasn't going to admit to her classmates that she couldn't do what they were expecting of her, and she was going to try her hardest to make it work out, whether her back stayed in one piece or not.

Her second pass by the crowd was done to a bit more applause, a bunch of cartwheels that ended in a single back tuck that had them impressed. "If I had one, I coulda done that on a balance beam for ya, but floor routine's all you're gettin' from me today," she told them with a smile, hoping that her nervousness on what she was going to do next wasn't super obvious. The last time she'd done anything of this sort was before she'd taken a vault too quickly and missed her marks, landing flat on her back and damaging both her spine and her chances at becoming an Olympic athlete someday. She knew the technical stuff like the back of her hand, but she wasn't sure if she could physically hold up.

There was no sense in not giving it a go, though, and so she took in a deep breath, had her destination in her sights, and began making a charge for it. Halfway down the concrete path she started having second regrets, but before she could stop herself her body was already going into a cartwheel, followed by one—two—three back handsprings that should have been followed by another back tuck, but the third handspring never landed appropriately. The moment she arched her back for it she felt a pop higher up, then nothing, and the only reason she knew she hit the ground was because she went head-first into the concrete.

She was beyond dazed as she heard people screaming, accompanied with initial laughter from a few before they realized she wasn't moving. "B-back away, I'm a nurse, I-I can help her," Mikan said as loudly as her timid voice seemed to allow, and so she was the first to make it to Akane's side, grabbing her hand and lifting it, the arm moving without Akane doing anything to force or stop it. "Ca-can you feel me squeezing you?"

Akane thought for a second, before giving her answer. "Couldn't even if I tried. Guess I shoulda told ya that I don't do much gymnast stuff 'cause I broke my back once, huh? Ol' sports injury that I really shoulda let ya know about…"

The hush that came over everyone made the air feel super still, and Akane would have said something about how everyone should've just believed her, but her head felt heavy and all she wanted to do was take a nap. "No, p-please keep your eyes open, we'll make sure you end up okay!" Mikan seemed beyond upset at what was happening, but it was hard for Akane to go along with her demands when she felt so, so tired.

She knew that the paralysis would go away on its own, that's what had happened before, but she kind of liked everyone's eyes on her for a reason that wasn't her showing off, so she decided she'd play up the injury and have everyone care for her for a while. If anything, it would get people to back off her lack of expressing her talent, and that was fine by her.

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**A/N: hi please ignore me ignoring canon, I want Akane to have a good story for once :C**


	11. Bleeding Through the Bandages - Tenko

A lot of mistakes had been made, admittedly, but Tenko was often too headstrong to admit when she was in a bad way and that she needed to back down. She'd been showing off all sorts of fun martial art skills that she'd acquired over the years to a group of young, impressionable girls, all of whom needed to learn how to defend themselves from anything violent and vicious, and that had been rather tame compared to other things she enjoyed doing. But when the session ended, and the girls were all picked up by their parents (who'd paid her for the session and a couple future ones at once), she tucked the money into her pocket and left her studio without much fear of what was going to happen to her.

After all, if someone wanted to pick a fight with Tenko Chabashira, they were stupid and deserved the beating they'd receive from it. But she hadn't thought much about hiding the money better, and having put it into her pocket in the view of the studio's front window, she had set herself up for a mugging once she'd started walking home. Muggers weren't the brightest of folk, she knew that to be true, but they were a bit of a challenge when there were a dozen burly, degenerate men compared to her and her alone. Even with her arsenal of fighting styles she couldn't protect herself from the gang that had decided to target her, and she found herself getting knocked out rather easily by the bunch of them.

When she woke up she found her hands to be bound and could tell that she'd been beat up in her unconscious state, even though she couldn't say a thing because her mouth was gagged. "What a pathetic showing," one of the muggers spat at her, his saliva landing on her face as he was mere centimeters from her. "Would've expected more of a fight from someone who claims to be the best at her fighting style."

She squirmed in the chair she was strapped to, but there wasn't much she could do aside from watching the man go through with attacking her again, slicing her arms and legs and making them sting, her muscles howling in pain from the assault. Once he felt she was properly taken care of, he undid the ties binding her and threw her out of the chair and into the cold, dark night, her clothes stripped away minus the essentials and her strength sapped from the injuries. Tenko was strong, but she wasn't strong enough to fight through forced muscle ruptures for more than a couple minutes; in the time that she had before she was out cold again she was able to drag herself out to a main street, a trail of blood following her as she slowly moved.

The next time she woke up was later that night, in the back of an ambulance with a technician asking her if she could recall what had happened to her. She was thankful that her injuries seemed to be focused on destroying her physical prowess, rather than harming her in other ways, but she could tell that the tech and the others present were worried about the chance of recovery she had from the attack. Repairing all the muscles that had been forcibly torn and ripped to shreds was going to be a difficult task, and after spending a few days in the hospital where she endured surgeries to try fixing them, the prognosis was grim: she was most likely going to be unable to perform her martial arts again.

But this was Tenko that was being told that she needed to give up, and she wanted to prove everyone wrong as soon as she possibly could. "Just you wait, in six months I'll be back at the top of my form, and my Neo-Aikido will be the talk of the town!" she declared, to the amusement of the nurses caring for her and to the chagrin of her doctors. "I'm going to prove once and for all that nothing, not even some degenerate muggers, can put me down!"

She was warned not to push herself further than she needed to, but Tenko was stubborn and she wasn't going to let the (overwhelmingly male) medical staff tell her that her life as she knew it was ruined. When she was cleared to walk on her own without support, the leg muscles not as damaged initially as the arm ones, she was right back in her studio, training herself for when the little girls would be back and when she'd be showing them why their parents had chosen her in the first place.

There were a lot of nights where she'd go home and have to re-bandage her surgical wounds several times, the blood seeping through them almost instantly from how much she'd reopened the scars. They were nasty to look at, and there were times that she thought she'd need to go back and get them re-stitched so that they'd eventually heal, but she ended up contacting some old friends to sew her up—having to explain the story of her getting mugged over a month's worth of rent money before anyone would agree to help her. Even after she was fixed a second time she would still frequently bleed through the bandages at the end of her practices, but it slowly began to taper off in terms of frequency, until it would happen in spotty moments at worst.

True to Tenko's word, six months after her proclamation at the hospital she was back to teaching girls how to defend themselves, even if she had some extra steps to give them that were outside the punches and kicks. The first one was to always make sure to hide money carefully if walking outside alone, the second being never to do business in front of wide open windows, and the third rule, the one she felt was most important to express, was that they never needed to let anyone tell them what they could or couldn't do.

"If you ever think you can't do something just because someone says you can't, remember that Tenko got attacked by twelve big dummies and they couldn't stop her from doing what she loves," she told the girls, flexing her arms and showing off the messy scars that she'd had to clean up so many times. "Now go out into the world and kick degenerates where it hurts!"

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**A/N: it's been a while since I last wrote one of these! I had a...really bad time for a while and I couldn't write anything for this story for my mental sake, but I'm back to being able to do it! (well, minus the one prompt I got that I want to write, I'm just not 100% confident in it yet!)**


	12. Slammed Into a Wall - Toko

Toko hated that she'd even considered volunteering at Hope's Peak for the day, given that she could have spent her time working on a draft of a personal novel instead. She'd been rather invested in getting the words down for the book, a change from anything she'd ever been contracted to write before simply because she felt inspired to get something akin to her own true story down in fiction form. So it wasn't quite her fault that she was thinking about the big twist in her novel—where the plucky heroine who'd just saved a family from careening over a bridge in their car turned out to be the same villain who'd cut their brakes in the first place—as she was walking through the crowded hallways of the school between class periods.

"I should have just said no, I was too busy to do this," she mumbled to herself, her thoughts still on the plot of the story even though her eyes were down on the piece of paper she was holding, which had a timetable for her day and what rooms she needed to be in at each point written out for her. When she looked up to see if she was close to the room she needed (the numbering system had changed since her time as a student there, and even though she recognized the floors she didn't know which classroom was what anymore) she nearly ran into a large, thick-shouldered student who barked at her when the ends of her long hair whipped against his side.

Her apologies weren't able to be heard over the din of the hallway, the other students around him too loud to let him hear her with her quiet, timid voice that she couldn't raise out of fear. "Next time I see you," he said, "it's going to be on sight. You hear that, bitch?"

Suppressing the desire to sneeze and fly off the handle due to it, Toko yelped and started running faster through the hall, coming into many other near-misses as she finally made her way to her destination. The classroom was nearly empty as she entered it, only a few students sitting in seats as the teacher welcomed her in with open arms, holding off on any sort of introduction until the class started.

In the moments before the final bell announced that everyone needed to be in their classrooms, the larger kid from the hallway came in, his eyes set on Toko like they were laser-guided to be there. Immediately she looked at the teacher, who was still smiling as if she didn't notice anything was amiss with one of her students, and it was then that Toko knew that despite Hope's Peak being a school for students with impeccable talents, some bad eggs were still going to get in, and she'd made enemies with one such person.

"Class, today we have a special guest," the teacher announced, motioning towards Toko as she stood as stiff as a board up against the wall. "This is famous author Toko Fukawa, a former student here at Hope's Peak, and a friend of our new headmaster's. He invited her in today to talk to us about good writing etiquette, so listen carefully, because what she says will be important for your next story." The teacher nodded towards Toko. "Go ahead and take the floor, Miss Fukawa, they're all yours."

Knowing that the student who'd threatened her was in the very room she was giving her presentation, Toko tried to power through things like nothing was wrong, but she was finding it hard to stay calm and collected in such a situation. She was getting snappish on top of stumbling over every other word she said, and while most of the students probably didn't know that she wasn't usually like that, the one who'd threatened her seemed to get that he was completely under her skin, smirking at her without the teacher noticing anything was amiss. Giving her best shot in that moment was hard, but she knew she had been asked to be there to teach these kids her personal experiences with "quality" writing, so that they could potentially become "good" writers themselves.

Not like it mattered when the audience she was speaking to had someone who was only there because of whatever talent he possessed, not because he was a good student. And the moment she was done talking, she left without opening the floor for questions, because she could see the seriousness in the kid's eyes every time she tracked towards him. Since the hallways were empty due to everyone still being in class, she thought she would get out free, make it to her next destination, and never have to think of that moment again.

She was dead wrong.

Before she could really realize anything was happening, she was slammed against the nearest wall, neatly between the lockers and a light fixture, the boy from earlier pinning her shoulders back as she dropped everything she'd been holding. "You thought you could come into my classroom and teach me a lesson? That teacher's a pushover, she let me leave just 'cause I said I needed to go. I told you it was on sight," he sneered, getting close to her face to the point that if she _hadn't_ been forced to shower that morning he would have been taking in nothing but her stench. "This is for thinkin' you're cool enough to touch me and get away with it."

"I-it wasn't on purpose, moron," she replied, knowing that she was living on borrowed time and that if he laid a hit on her she was done for. "As if I'd want to touch someone as sm-sm—_achoo_!" She'd gotten his hair on her nose and the resulting tickle was enough to get her to sneeze, and whatever came next was no longer between Toko and the bully, but rather the bully and a known serial killer.

That night when she got home, she had to clean her scissors several times to get all of the gore out of them, and her materials had a couple splotches of blood here and there, but when Komaru asked her what she'd done to make such a mess, Toko assured her that she didn't _kill_ the guy who was antagonizing her. She merely made him realize that slamming the school's special guest up against the wall wasn't a smart choice, and that perhaps he'd need to get his new piercings on his nose checked out for infection, because they shouldn't be so large that she could stick scissors through them.

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**A/N: I had set this one aside for a little bit because I wasn't confident in writing Toko, but then after writing her in _Graffiti Hearts_ I decided it was time I could revisit this prompt and get it done!**


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